The cosmic secret that will destroy their world is that for an asteroid about a kilometre across to retain enough atmosphere for that sort of activity it has to be dense and massive – and will therefore be pulling that moon towards it unless both are about to run into that black hole.

Oh, and the black hole’s sending out hard X rays so they’ll be dead long before they meet the event horizon.

Too many moons! Too many suns! At least three of each. The eclipsed sun isn’t casting any shadows so there is a pair of suns illuminating the cloned sister-wives of the “man of the future”. “Artistic Bomb”

He’s got one nipple, and I can’t tell if the woman far left has any. Perhaps there’s a general nipple shortage in the future, and you have to earn them to get your genetic nipple engineering? Either this scenario or @GSS Admin’s might explain the lack of papillial organs.

I see this cover features the “Seizure Sans” or “Astigmatism Sans” font, before we even get to the title on fire.

@BC: My thought exactly. Perhaps they’ve just fallen through that black hole, therefore being out of our universe somewhere and thus beyond the stars.

“Oh, god! I already have one growing out of my back, and it looks like I have Sexy Clone fallout on my arm, too!”

@B. Chiclitz: intergalactic space?

@Tat Wood: gravity falls off as a square of the ratio of distance from the center of a body to the distance to the surface of the body from it’s center, so the gravity of a 1 mile diameter planet would fall off quite fast with distance. (Someone let me know if I’m wrong, my physics are rusty)

@BAM—I won’t judge your physics, since mine are no doubt worse, but with respect to language, “intergalactic” means “between galaxies,” not “beyond.” I thought by definition there is no “beyond.” Drawing upon what physics I’ve picked up from Bibliomancer over the years, space itself depends on the presence of matter, since matter is just a warp in space. So beyond the point where the last piece of matter, presumably a star, lies, there would be, literally, nothing. Hardly a place for “high adventure” at any rate.

I think the warping of space by matter means that unless the universe is genuinely infinite, no matter how far you went you’d (after however many billions or trillions of years) get back to where you started anyway. Intergalactic space is as _close_ to beyond the stars as you can get – stars are pretty thinly scattered outside of galaxies. But I concede the point that it’s a poor turn of phrase (Even if a “beyond” existed and was reachable, what does this universe beyond stars and their accompanying planets consist of? Pancakes? Teacups?)

Really, it only makes sense in the geocentric universes with celestial spheres and such.

@[email protected]—This exchange is why the time I spend here continues, after lo these many years, to be the best part of my day. Now I am heading off to Bed Bath and Beyond to buy an intergalactic griddle to whip up my next batch of high adventure pancakes. GSS!

@B’mancer: I don’t see any turtles, so they are Beyond those for sure.

The first time I saw a Bed Bath and Beyond (before they became ubiquitous), my friends and I made a lot of fun of it. What, exactly, did one furnish Beyond with? Apparently, naked people and random clip art.

(At the time, we surmised there was a door to Narnia, which would have been much more wholesome, and what sort of housewares would talking animals want, anyway?)